Josef “Jeff” Sipek

A recent upgrade of FreeBSD on my desktop resulted in just about every program (Firefox, KiCAD, but thankfully not urxvt) rendering various ligatures even for monospaced fonts. Needless to say, this is really annoying when looking at code, etc. Not having any better ideas, I asked on Mastodon if anyone knew how to turn this mis-feature off.

About an hour later, @monwarez@bsd.cafe suggested dropping the following XML in /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.avail/29-local-noto-mono-fixup.conf and adding a symlink in ../conf.d to enable it:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
	<description>Disable ligatures for monospaced fonts to avoid ff, fi, ffi, etc. becoming only one character wide</description>
	<match target="font">
		<test name="family" compare="eq">
			<string>Noto Sans Mono</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="fontfeatures" mode="append">
			<string>liga off</string>
			<string>dlig off</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
</fontconfig>

This solved my problem. Hopefully this will help others. if not, it’s a note-to-self for when I need to reapply this fixup :)